Stephen Sawyer

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Stephen Sawyer

Professor

Stephen W. Sawyer is Professor of History at The American University of Paris. Sawyer came to AUP from the University of Chicago center in Paris and the Ecole Normale Supérieure where he was lecturer in the final years of his dissertation. After receiving fellowships from the EHESS, Fulbright, and Sciences Po, from 2005 to 2009, Sawyer served as part-time assistant to Pierre Rosanvallon at the Collège de France. A specialist in urban and political history, Sawyer earned his PhD at the University of Chicago.

In 2009, he was awarded a grant to complete a two-year research project for the city of Paris on mapping cultural scenes in metropolitan Paris. In January 2012, Sawyer became the Associate Editor for the English version of the Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales and member of the journal's editorial board. In 2014-15, he was named Neubauer Collegium Fellow at the University of Chicago. Since 2014 he has been named Directeur de publications of the Tocqueville Review and Director of the Center for Critical Democracy Studies at the AUP. In 2018-2019, he will be a research fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

His work includes over sixty articles and reviews, in six countries and leading journals including The American Historical Review, Les Annales, The Journal of Modern History, The European History Quarterly and The Tocqueville Review. His translation of Michel Foucault's lectures Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice (University of Chicago Press) appeared in 2014. His other book-length projects to date may be broadly divided into three parts. He has co-edited 3 volumes elaborating a transnational project on the democratic state with his colleagues William Novak and James Sparrow, including Boundaries of the State in US History (University of Chicago Press, 2015), A Comparative History of the French and American Democratic States (Tocqueville Review, 2012) and Beyond Stateless Democracy (Tocqueville Review, Spring 2015). He has also co-edited three volumes exploring the legacy of late twentieth-century French political and social thought, including In Search of the Liberal Moment: Democracy, Antitotalitarianism and Intellectual Politics in France since 1950 (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2016), Pierre Rosanvallon's Political Thought (Bielefeld University Press, 2018) and Michel Foucault, Neoliberalism and Beyond (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019). In 2018, he published the first volume of his history of democracy entitled Demos Assembled: Democracy and the International Origins of the Modern State, 1840-1880 (University of Chicago Press) as well as a work focusing specifically on the contentious figure and first executive of the French Third Republic Adolphe Thiers, entitled La contingence et le pouvoir, (Armand Colin, 2018),which further explored the methodology proposed in his previous work, what he refers to as a pragmatic history of the political. He is currently working on the second volume of his history of nineteenth-century democracy under the working title: The Democratic Revolution: Regulation and the Birth of the Social Democratic Contract, 1810-1850.

Education/Degrees

PhD, University of Chicago

MA, University of Chicago

BA, Hanover College

News

Stephen Sawyer was recently named Directeur de publication of the Tocqueville Review and Director of the Center for Critical Democracy Studies at AUP.

Articles and Book Chapters

Forthcoming 2016. “Toward a New Genealogy of the American Political,” (with William J. Novak and James T. Sparrow) in The Many Hands of the State, Ann Orloff and Kimberly Morgan, eds. Cambridge University Press.

2010. “The Infinite Space of the Particular: Planning the American City in the work of Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham and Frank Lloyd Wright,” Cultural Transformations in the English Speaking World (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press), pp 152-169.

2009. “The Site of Generality: Placing Chicago in the American Regime of Commensurability” in Paris-Chicago: Urban Cultures in Comparative Perspective. Cahiers Parisiens. Vol. 5 (University of Chicago-Paris).

2009. “The French Foundations of the American Capital: Eighteenth-Century French Political Theory and the Creation of Washington D.C.” La France en Amérique. Susanne Berthier-Foglar, ed. (Éditions de l'université de Savoie), pp 187-205.

2007. “A Question of Life or Death: Administrative Bodies and Administrating Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Paris,” in Fields of Expertise: A Comparative History of Expert Procedures in Paris and London, 1600 to present. C. Rabier, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press), pp. 291-315.

2005. “Locating the Center: Confining and Defining the Capital through the Parisian Fortifications.” Special issue on Centers and Peripheries. Nottingham French Studies. February, pp 20-37.

2002. Pamphlets and Periodicals from the Revolution of 1848. Interactive and fully searchable on-line database of over 200 rare and previously unavailable newspapers and pamphlets from the 1848 Revolution in France

History and literature

Manuscript in progress Veridiction and the Liberal State of Exception in Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor

2008. “Between Authorship and Agency: Democracy as History in the Work of George Bancroft,” Revue française d’études américaines, no. 118, vol. 4, pp 49-66.

Article and lecture translations

2006. Monique David-Ménard. “Democracy and Subjectivity.” Paper given for Trope, Affect, and Democratic Subjectivity at the Center for Global Culture and Communication, Northwestern University.

2006. Pierre Rosanvallon. The Democracy of Distrust: Institutions and Practices of Counter-Politics in Historical Perspective. Cours au Collège de France given for the Sealy Lectures at Cambridge University.

2004. Jean-Luc Nancy. “The Technique of the Present.” Trans. Agnès Derail-Imbert and Stephen W. Sawyer. In On Kawara: Paintings of 40 Years. New York: David Werner.

Conferences & Lectures

Lectures and papers delivered on invitation

“Adolphe Thiers and the payment of the Franco-Prussian war reparations” Symposium on Debt, Democracy, Citizenship: A Political History of Public Debts (Europe and the United States, from the Late Eighteenth Century), Sciences Po, Paris, June 24, 2013

“Governing Through Necessity: Adolphe Thiers’ Liberal Democratic State” Seminar on Transnational History of the State at Sciences-Po, Paris. December 17, 2012

“Lincoln, Emancipation, and the Making of a Modern Liberal State,” (with William Novak), University of Michigan, Proclaiming Emancipation: Slavery and Freedom in the Era of the Civil War. Program in Race Law and History, 2012

Representative Men, Terror and the British Liberal State in Nineteenth-Century French Republicanism, University of Chicago, Franke Institute for the Humanities. Sponsored by the Political Science Department, History Department and Nicholson Center for British Studies, May 16, 2012

The American Origins of the French Liberal State, New York University, The Remarque Institute, Symposium on the American State. October 21, 2010

"Lives and Afterlives of the French Revolution", Paris, France, World Presidents Organization Annual Conference (Invited Plenary Speaker), May 9, 2010

Une cartographie culturelle du Grand Paris pour le XXIe siècle, Hôtel de Ville, Paris. 1400 attendees. Among 12 chosen from the 75 recipients who received grants from the City of Paris between 2005-2011 to present the work of our research team to the City. Opened by Bertrand Delanoe (Mayor of Paris), November 18, 2011

Toward a Cultural Cartography of the Grand Paris, University of Chicago Workshop on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Modern France, May 19, 2011

"The Grand Paris: Cultural Milieu in the Process of Metropolitanization", Berlin, Germany, Hertie School of Governance, Cultures and Globalization Symposium, organized by Helmut Anheier and Raj Isar, December, 2010

"Archaeology of the Paris Underground", Amsterdam, Netherlands, University of Amsterdam, Symposium on Paris-Amsterdam Underground organized by Andrew Hussey and Christopher Linder. November, 2010

"The Culture of Metropolitan Democracy: Scenes of Mobilization in the Grand Paris", Gothenburg, Sweden, ISA World Congress of Sociology (invited and financed by Research Community 3), July 11-17, 2010

“Adolphe Thiers and the payment of the Franco-Prussian war reparations” Symposium on Debt, Democracy, Citizenship: A Political History of Public Debts (Europe and the United States, from the Late Eighteenth Century),Sciences Po, Paris, June 24, 2013

“Governing Through Necessity: Adolphe Thiers’ Liberal Democratic State” Seminar on Transnational History of the State at Sciences-Po, Paris. December 17, 2012

“Competitive Urbanism, the Olympics and the Remaking of Urban Space: New York and Paris in Comparative Perspective.” Seminar: Globalisation et Sciences Sociales. L’Université Cergy-Pontoise. March 22, 2012

"The Case of Billy Bud: Representative Men, Terror and the Liberal State of Exception". Seminar: VORTEX, Université Paris 3 Sorbonne-Nouvelle. December 10, 2011

“La Petite traversée du Grand Paris. Vers une apprehension globale des ‘ambiances’ dans l’espace métropolitain.” One of three finalists invited to present our article for a prize (2500 euros) given by the Institute for the City and Commerce. September 27 at the Institut pour la ville et le commerce, Paris, 2011

“Nothing Succeeds Like Failure: Local Impact of Global Mega-Events in New York and Paris in the wake of failed Olympic bids” (with Scott Salmon) New School for Social Research, New York, May 5, 2011

“Local Bureaucracy, Universal Power: The Political Construction of Scale in Revolutionary Paris, 1789-1815” Historical Institute, University of Texas-Austin. March 7, 2011

Invited Discussant for a symposium on “Spontaneity and Organization in European Democratic Contention.” Center for European Studies and the Political Science Department, University of Texas, Austin. The symposium was organized by Kurt Weyland and included invitations to Kathleen Canning, David Shafer, Jonathan Sperber and Michael Geyer, 2011

“From Utopia to Usonia and from Crabgrass to Celebration: Critical Perspectives in American Urban Form” Plenary lecture given for the Master’s Program in Urban Planning, Paris-1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, January 11, 2010

Conference papers

“Downscaling Competitive City Discourse: The Local Construction of Urban Space in the Wake of Failed 2012 Olympic Bids” Paper presented with Scott Salmon (NSSR), Urban Affairs Association, New Orleans, March 16, 2011

“Roundtable on post-1789: Events and Repercussions” with William Doyle, Alan Forrest, Colin Jones and Annie Jourdan. The Bicentennial of the French Revolution Comes of Age, organized by David Andress, Portsmouth, England, July 5-7, 2010

“Specifi-Cities of the Paris-Metropole: Cultural Planning and Citizen Politics in an Age of Democratic Distrust” European Symposium Culture, territories and society in Europe. What is at stake in redefining cultural policies? May 28-29, 2009, Grenoble, France.

Locating Chicago: Louis Sullivan and the Search for an American Urban Form, Université de Provence, Aix-en-Provence, France, 14 March, 2008

“Provincializing Paris: Towards a History of the Paris which is France.” Paper presented at the conference Mapping France held by the Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France, University of Reading, 6-8 September, 2007

“Capitalizing on the Parisian Municipality: Contested Definitions of the Parisian Administration in Revolutionary France,” Conference of the French Historical Society, Milwaukee, WI, June, Paris, 2004

“Writing the Center into History.” Conference on Centers and Peripheries: Cultural Memory in France. Florida State University, Tallahassee, October, 2003

Parisians into Frenchmen: Confining and Defining the Capital through the Fortifications of 1841. The Society for the Study of French History, Nottingham, England, April, 2003

The Taming of Paris: Municipal and National Authority in the French Capital, 1846-1851. The Western Society for French History, Baltimore, October, 2002